Of the four recruiters who received my letter, two were small
independents and two were larger national companies.

The person I spoke to at one of the larger companies completely failed
to get it, and asked the usual “so how many years of websphere
experience do you have?” questions. *plonk*

I had a bit more luck with the other large shop, ending up speaking to
their national manager, presumably because I was “too hard” for the
front line folks. :) We had a promising conversation, but nothing
concrete yet.

Of the two independents, one said he would “keep his eyes out”, which
is actually a satisfactory result–a lot better than “no worries, I’ll
try and push you in to whatever crap I have on the books right now”.

The other has come through with an interview for a
reasonable-sounding job. The company appears to be a combination of
in-house and customer-facing work. I don’t know much yet, but current
employees rave about the place in their blogs.